One of the first people I friended on twitter was Electra (Christa Foley irl), who as it turned out was the Recruiting Manager for Zappos in Las Vegas, Nevada. She definitely used twitter for business, but she was still fun and interesting to follow. I knew Zappos was pioneering a revolutionary approach to customer relationship using social media, and when Tony Hsieh was featured again on Inc Magazine I hit up Christa Foley for a tour.
For those that don’t know, Zappos welcomes outsiders. By welcome, I mean they make you feel more at home than if you were at Mom’s house. A van picked me up from the airport and dropped me off after. Zappos focuses on the little things that make a fun experience epic.
Going through the different departments (each decorated as a theme, the rainforest was my favorite and the super hero village was a close second) something kept nagging at me. About 15 minutes into it, I realized that everyone was happy! There was a fair amount of goofing off, which was actually finding unique ways to help customers. This was my first experience where people were competing to create the most awesome customer experience humanly possible.
I had bartered the day off to check out their warehouse management system, which was at least at part, the same one we used at Eldorado Stone and the core of the WMS User Group I had put together a couple years prior. While they didn’t have a warehouse for me to ogle over, I didn’t come back to Eldorado Stone disappointed.
I finally had a case-in-point to propose Social Media to Eldorado Stone!